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Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch is a Senior Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on open government, transparency and privacy issues in new technologies as part of EFF’s Transparency Project. In addition to government transparency, Jennifer writes and speaks frequently on government surveillance programs, domestic drones, location data, and biometrics. She has written an influential white paper on biometric data collection in immigrant communities and has testified about facial recognition and its Fourth Amendment implications before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. In Jennifer's transparency work, she successfully sued the Federal Aviation Administration and Customs and Border Protection to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished drone records and the FBI to obtain new and revealing information about its Next Generation Identification face recognition program. Prior to joining EFF, Jennifer was the Clinical Teaching Fellow with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she specialized in privacy and intellectual property issues. Before the Clinic, Jennifer practiced civil litigation with Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz (now retired) in the Central District of California. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley. She has published academically on identity theft and phishing attacks (20 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 259) and sovereign immunity in civil rights cases (62 Fla. L. Rev. 203) and has been interviewed by major and technical news media, including NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, NPR, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, CNet, Nova, Popular Science, Scientific American, and Ars Technica.

In the latest turn in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records related to the government’s use of social networking websites, the Department of Justice finally agreed to release almost 100 pages of new records.

2011 was an important year for court decisions interpreting the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Supreme Court issued two decisions that promoted government transparency and limited the scope of FOIA exemptions, while two district courts addressed how the government administers FOIA. All of those decisions will help shape FOIA to the benefit of the public.
Milner v. Department of Navy

An order from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has revealed the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), taking the position that FOIA allows it to withhold information from the court whenever it thinks this is in the interest of national security.

This week, Wired’s Danger Room blog reported on the FBI’s efforts to track Muslims in the United States using “geo-maps.” The maps, released in response to ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, show that the FBI is tracking Muslims and mapping Muslim communities extensivel

“When everything is classified, then nothing is classified…The system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” ~ Justice Stewart, New York Times v. United States, 1971.